No More Learning

His Majesty must make up his mind to give a marked preference
to one or the other; and there were three weighty reasons for giving the
preference to the Whigs.

In the first place, the Whigs were on principle attached to the reigning
dynasty. In their view the Revolution had been, not merely necessary,
not merely justifiable, but happy and glorious. It had been the triumph
of their political theory. When they swore allegiance to William, they
swore without scruple or reservation; and they were so far from having
any doubt about his title that they thought it the best of all titles.
The Tories, on the other hand, very generally disapproved of that vote
of the Convention which had placed him on the throne. Some of them were
at heart Jacobites, and had taken the oath of allegiance to him only
that they might be able to injure him. Others, though they thought
it their duty to obey him as King in fact, denied that he was King by
right, and, if they were loyal to him, were loyal without enthusiasm.
There could, therefore, be little doubt on which of the two parties it
would be safer for him to rely.

In the second place, as to the particular matter on which his heart
was at present set, the Whigs were, as a body, prepared to support him
strenuously, and the Tories were, as a body, inclined to thwart him. The
minds of men were at this time much occupied by the question, in what
way the war ought to be carried on. To that question the two parties
returned very different answers. An opinion had during many months been
growing among the Tories that the policy of England ought to be strictly
insular; that she ought to leave the defence of Flanders and the Rhine
to the States General, the House of Austria and the Princes of the
Empire; that she ought to carry on hostilities with vigour by sea, but
to keep up only such an army as might, with the help of the militia, be
sufficient to repel an invasion. It was plain that, if this system
were adopted, there might be an immediate reduction of the taxes which
pressed most heavily on the nation. But the Whigs maintained that
this relief would be dearly purchased. Many thousands of brave English
soldiers were now in Flanders. Yet the allies had not been able to
prevent the French from taking Mons in 1691, Namur in 1692, Charleroy in
1693. If the English troops were withdrawn, it was certain that Ostend,
Ghent, Liege, Brussels would fall. The German Princes would hasten to
make peace, each for himself. The Spanish Netherlands would probably be
annexed to the French monarchy. The United Provinces would be again in
as great peril as in 1672, and would accept whatever terms Lewis might
be pleased to dictate. In a few months, he would be at liberty to put
forth his whole strength against our island. Then would come a struggle
for life and death. It might well be hoped that we should be able to
defend our soil even against such a general and such an army as had
won the battle of Landen. But the fight must be long and hard. How many
fertile counties would be turned into deserts, how many flourishing
towns would be laid in ashes, before the invaders were destroyed or
driven out! One triumphant campaign in Kent and Middlesex would do more
to impoverish the nation than ten disastrous campaigns in Brabant. It is
remarkable that this dispute between the two great factions was, during
seventy years, regularly revived as often as our country was at war with
France. That England ought never to attempt great military operations on
the Continent continued to be a fundamental article of the creed of the
Tories till the French Revolution produced a complete change in their
feelings. [476] As the chief object of William was to open the
campaign of 1694 in Flanders with an immense display of force, it was
sufficiently clear to whom he must look for assistance.

In the third place, the Whigs were the stronger party in Parliament. The
general election of 1690, indeed, had not been favourable to them.
They had been, for a time, a minority; but they had ever since been
constantly gaining ground; they were now in number a full half of the
Lower House; and their effective strength was more than proportioned
to their number; for in energy, alertness and discipline, they were
decidedly superior to their opponents. Their organization was not indeed
so perfect as it afterwards became; but they had already begun to
look for guidance to a small knot of distinguished men, which was long
afterwards widely known by the name of the junto. There is, perhaps, no
parallel in history, ancient or modern, to the authority exercised by
this council, during twenty troubled years, over the Whig body. The men
who acquired that authority in the days of William and Mary continued
to possess it, without interruption, in office and out of office, till
George the First was on the throne.

One of these men was Russell. Of his shameful dealings with the Court of
Saint Germains we possess proofs which leave no room for doubt. But no
such proofs were laid before the world till he had been many years dead.
If rumours of his guilt got abroad, they were vague and improbable; they
rested on no evidence; they could be traced to no trustworthy author;
and they might well be regarded by his contemporaries as Jacobite
calumnies. What was quite certain was that he sprang from an illustrious
house, which had done and suffered great things for liberty and for the
Protestant religion, that he had signed the invitation of the thirtieth
of June, that he had landed with the Deliverer at Torbay, that he had in
Parliament, on all occasions, spoken and voted as a zealous Whig,
that he had won a great victory, that he had saved his country from an
invasion, and that, since he had left the Admiralty, every thing had
gone wrong. We cannot therefore wonder that his influence over his party
should have been considerable.

But the greatest man among the members of the junto, and, in some
respects, the greatest man of that age, was the Lord Keeper Somers. He
was equally eminent as a jurist and as a politician, as an orator and as
a writer. His speeches have perished; but his State papers remain, and
are models of terse, luminous, and dignified eloquence. He had left
a great reputation in the House of Commons, where he had, during four
years, been always heard with delight; and the Whig members still looked
up to him as their leader, and still held their meetings under his roof.
In the great place to which he had recently been promoted, he had so
borne himself that, after a very few months, even faction and envy had
ceased to murmur at his elevation. In truth, he united all the
qualities of a great judge, an intellect comprehensive, quick and acute,
diligence, integrity, patience, suavity. In council, the calm wisdom
which he possessed in a measure rarely found among men of parts so quick
and of opinions so decided as his, acquired for him the authority of
an oracle. The superiority of his powers appeared not less clearly in
private circles. The charm of his conversation was heightened by the
frankness with which he poured out his thoughts. [477] His good temper
and his good breeding never failed. His gesture, his look, his tones
were expressive of benevolence. His humanity was the more remarkable,
because he had received from nature a body such as is generally found
united with a peevish and irritable mind. His life was one long malady;
his nerves were weak; his complexion was livid; his face was prematurely
wrinkled. Yet his enemies could not pretend that he had ever once,
during a long and troubled public life, been goaded, even by sudden
provocation, into vehemence inconsistent with the mild dignity of his
character. All that was left to them was to assert that his disposition
was very far from being so gentle as the world believed, that he was
really prone to the angry passions, and that sometimes, while his voice
was soft, and his words kind and courteous, his delicate frame was
almost convulsed by suppressed emotion. It will perhaps be thought that
this reproach is the highest of all eulogies.

The most accomplished men of those times have told us that there was
scarcely any subject on which Somers was not competent to instruct and
to delight. He had never travelled; and, in that age, an Englishman who
had not travelled was generally thought incompetent to give an opinion
on works of art. But connoisseurs familiar with the masterpieces of the
Vatican and of the Florentine gallery allowed that the taste of Somers
in painting and sculpture was exquisite. Philology was one of his
favourite pursuits. He had traversed the whole vast range of polite
literature, ancient and modern. He was at once a munificent and severely
judicious patron of genius and learning. Locke owed opulence to Somers.
By Somers Addison was drawn forth from a cell in a college. In distant
countries the name of Somers was mentioned with respect and gratitude
by great scholars and poets who had never seen his face. He was the
benefactor of Leclerc. He was the friend of Filicaja. Neither political
nor religious differences prevented him from extending his powerful
protection to merit. Hickes, the fiercest and most intolerant of all
the nonjurors, obtained, by the influence of Somers, permission to
study Teutonic antiquities in freedom and safety. Vertue, a strict Roman
Catholic, was raised by the discriminating and liberal patronage of
Somers from poverty and obscurity to the first rank among the engravers
of the age.

The generosity with which Somers treated his opponents was the more
honourable to him because he was no waverer in politics. From the
beginning to the end of his public life he was a steady Whig. His voice
was indeed always raised, when his party was dominant in the State,
against violent and vindictive counsels; but he never forsook his
friends, even when their perverse neglect of his advice had brought them
to the verge of ruin.

His powers of mind and his acquirements were not denied, even by his
detractors. The most acrimonious Tories were forced to admit, with an
ungracious snarl, which increased the value of their praise, that he had
all the intellectual qualities of a great man, and that in him alone,
among his contemporaries, brilliant eloquence and wit were to be found
associated with the quiet and steady prudence which ensures success
in life. It is a remarkable fact, that, in the foulest of all the many
libels that were published against him, he was slandered under the name
of Cicero. As his abilities could not be questioned, he was charged with
irreligion and immorality. That he was heterodox all the country vicars
and foxhunting squires firmly believed; but as to the nature and extent
of his heterodoxy there were many different opinions. He seems to have
been a Low Churchman of the school of Tillotson, whom he always
loved and honoured; and he was, like Tillotson, called by bigots a
Presbyterian, an Arian, a Socinian, a Deist, and an Atheist.

The private life of this great statesman and magistrate was malignantly
scrutinised; and tales were told about his libertinism which went on
growing till they became too absurd for the credulity even of party
spirit. At last, long after he had been condemned to flannel and chicken
broth, a wretched courtesan, who had probably never seen him except in
the stage box at the theatre, when she was following her vocation below
in a mask, published a lampoon in which she described him as the master
of a haram more costly than the Great Turk's. There is, however, reason
to believe that there was a small nucleus of truth round which this
great mass of fiction gathered, and that the wisdom and selfcommand
which Somers never wanted in the senate, on the judgment seat, at the
council board, or in the society of wits, scholars and philosophers,
were not always proof against female attractions. [478]

Another director of the Whig party was Charles Montague. He was often,
when he had risen to power, honours and riches, called an upstart by
those who envied his success. That they should have called him so may
seem strange; for few of the statesmen of his time could show such a
pedigree as his. He sprang from a family as old as the Conquest; he was
in the succession to an earldom, and was, by the paternal side, cousin
of three earls. But he was the younger son of a younger brother; and
that phrase had, ever since the time of Shakspeare and Raleigh, and
perhaps before their time, been proverbially used to designate a person
so poor as to be broken to the most abject servitude or ready for the
most desperate adventure.

Charles Montague was early destined for the Church, was entered on the
foundation of Westminster, and, after distinguishing himself there by
skill in Latin versification, was sent up to Trinity College, Cambridge.
At Cambridge the philosophy of Des Cartes was still dominant in the
schools. But a few select spirits had separated from the crowd, and
formed a fit audience round a far greater teacher. [479] Conspicuous
among the youths of high promise who were proud to sit at the feet of
Newton was the quick and versatile Montague. Under such guidance the
young student made considerable proficiency in the severe sciences; but
poetry was his favourite pursuit; and when the University invited her
sons to celebrate royal marriages and funerals, he was generally allowed
to have surpassed his competitors. His fame travelled to London; he
was thought a clever lad by the wits who met at Will's, and the lively
parody which he wrote, in concert with his friend and fellow student
Prior, on Dryden's Hind and Panther, was received with great applause.

At this time all Montague's wishes pointed towards the Church. At a
later period, when he was a peer with twelve thousand a year, when his
villa on the Thames was regarded as the most delightful of all suburban
retreats, when he was said to revel in Tokay from the Imperial cellar,
and in soups made out of birds' nests brought from the Indian Ocean, and
costing three guineas a piece, his enemies were fond of reminding him
that there had been a time when he had eked out by his wits an income
of barely fifty pounds, when he had been happy with a trencher of mutton
chops and a flagon of ale from the College buttery, and when a tithe
pig was the rarest luxury for which he had dared to hope. The Revolution
came, and changed his whole scheme of life. He obtained, by the
influence of Dorset, who took a peculiar pleasure in befriending young
men of promise, a seat in the House of Commons. Still, during a few
months, the needy scholar hesitated between politics and divinity. But
it soon became clear that, in the new order of things, parliamentary
ability must fetch a higher price than any other kind of ability; and
he felt that in parliamentary ability he had no superior. He was in the
very situation for which he was peculiarly fitted by nature; and during
some years his life was a series of triumphs.

Of him, as of several of his contemporaries, especially of Mulgrave and
of Sprat, it may be said that his fame has suffered from the folly of
those editors who, down to our own time, have persisted in reprinting
his rhymes among the works of the British poets. There is not a year in
which hundreds of verses as good as any that he ever wrote are not sent
in for the Newdigate prize at Oxford and for the Chancellor's medal at
Cambridge. His mind had indeed great quickness and vigour, but not that
kind of quickness and vigour which produces great dramas or odes; and
it is most unjust to him that his loan of Honour and his Epistle on
the Battle of the Boyne should be placed side by side with Comus
and Alexander's Feast. Other eminent statesmen and orators, Walpole,
Pulteney, Chatham, Fox, wrote poetry not better than his. But
fortunately for them, their metrical compositions were never thought
worthy to be admitted into any collection of our national classics.

It has long been usual to represent the imagination under the figure of
a wing, and to call the successful exertions of the imagination flights.
One poet is the eagle; another is the swan; a third modestly compares
himself to the bee. But none of these types would have suited Montague.
His genius may be compared to that pinion which, though it is too weak
to lift the ostrich into the air, enables her, while she remains on the
earth, to outrun hound, horse and dromedary. If the man who possesses
this kind of genius attempts to ascend the heaven of invention, his
awkward and unsuccessful efforts expose him to derision. But if he will
be content to stay in the terrestrial region of business, he will find
that the faculties which would not enable him to soar into a higher
sphere will enable him to distance all his competitors in the lower. As
a poet Montague could never have risen above the crowd. But in the House
of Commons, now fast becoming supreme in the State, and extending
its control over one executive department after another, the young
adventurer soon obtained a place very different from the place which he
occupies among men of letters. At thirty, he would gladly have given all
his chances in life for a comfortable vicarage and a chaplain's scarf.
At thirty-seven, he was First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the
Exchequer and a Regent of the kingdom; and this elevation he owed not
at all to favour, but solely to the unquestionable superiority of his
talents for administration and debate.

The extraordinary ability with which, at the beginning of the year 1692,
he managed the conference on the Bill for regulating Trials in cases of
Treason, placed him at once in the first rank of parliamentary orators.
On that occasion he was opposed to a crowd of veteran senators renowned
for their eloquence, Halifax, Rochester, Nottingham, Mulgrave, and
proved himself a match for them all. He was speedily seated at the Board
of Treasury; and there the clearheaded and experienced Godolphin soon
found that his young colleague was his master. When Somers had quitted
the House of Commons, Montague had no rival there. Sir Thomas Littleton,
once distinguished as the ablest debater and man of business among the
Whig members, was content to serve under his junior. To this day we may
discern in many parts of our financial and commercial system the marks
of the vigorous intellect and daring spirit of Montague. His bitterest
enemies were unable to deny that some of the expedients which he had
proposed had proved highly beneficial to the nation. But it was said
that these expedients were not devised by himself. He was represented,
in a hundred pamphlets, as the daw in borrowed plumes. He had taken, it
was affirmed, the hint of every one of his great plans from the writings
or the conversation of some ingenious speculator. This reproach was,
in truth, no reproach. We can scarcely expect to find in the same human
being the talents which are necessary for the making of new discoveries
in political science, and the talents which obtain the assent of divided
and tumultuous assemblies to great practical reforms. To be at once an
Adam Smith and a Pitt is scarcely possible. It is surely praise enough
for a busy politician that he knows how to use the theories of others,
that he discerns, among the schemes of innumerable projectors, the
precise scheme which is wanted and which is practicable, that he shapes
it to suit pressing circumstances and popular humours, that he proposes
it just when it is most likely to be favourably received, that he
triumphantly defends it against all objectors, and that he carries it
into execution with prudence and energy; and to this praise no English
statesman has a fairer claim than Montague.

It is a remarkable proof of his selfknowledge that, from the moment at
which he began to distinguish himself in public life, he ceased to be
a versifier. It does not appear that, after he became a Lord of the
Treasury, he ever wrote a couplet, with the exception of a few well
turned lines inscribed on a set of toasting glasses which were sacred
to the most renowned Whig beauties of his time. He wisely determined
to derive from the poetry of others a glory which he never would have
derived from his own. As a patron of genius and learning he ranks with
his two illustrious friends, Dorset and Somers. His munificence fully
equalled theirs; and, though he was inferior to them in delicacy of
taste, he succeeded in associating his name inseparably with some names
which will last as long as our language.

Yet it must be acknowledged that Montague, with admirable parts and
with many claims on the gratitude of his country, had great faults, and
unhappily faults not of the noblest kind. His head was not strong enough
to bear without giddiness the speed of his ascent and the height of his
position. He became offensively arrogant and vain. He was too often cold
to his old friends, and ostentatious in displaying his new riches. Above
all, he was insatiably greedy of praise, and liked it best when it was
of the coarsest and rankest quality. But, in 1693, these faults were
less offensive than they became a few years later.

With Russell, Somers and Montague, was closely connected, during
a quarter of a century a fourth Whig, who in character bore little
resemblance to any of them. This was Thomas Wharton, eldest son of
Philip Lord Wharton. Thomas Wharton has been repeatedly mentioned in the
course of this narrative. But it is now time to describe him more
fully. He was in his forty-seventh year, but was still a young man in
constitution, in appearance and in manners. Those who hated him most
heartily,--and no man was hated more heartily,--admitted that his
natural parts were excellent, and that he was equally qualified for
debate and for action. The history of his mind deserves notice; for it
was the history of many thousands of minds. His rank and abilities
made him so conspicuous that in him we are able to trace distinctly
the origin and progress of a moral taint which was epidemic among his
contemporaries.

He was born in the days of the Covenant, and was the heir of a
covenanted house. His father was renowned as a distributor of
Calvinistic tracts, and a patron of Calvinistic divines. The boy's first
years were past amidst Geneva bands, heads of lank hair, upturned eyes,
nasal psalmody, and sermons three hours long. Plays and poems, hunting
and dancing, were proscribed by the austere discipline of his saintly
family. The fruits of this education became visible, when, from the
sullen mansion of Puritan parents, the hotblooded, quickwitted young
patrician emerged into the gay and voluptuous London of the Restoration.
The most dissolute cavaliers stood aghast at the dissoluteness of the
emancipated precisian. He early acquired and retained to the last the
reputation of being the greatest rake in England. Of wine indeed he
never became the slave; and he used it chiefly for the purpose of making
himself the master of his associates. But to the end of his long life
the wives and daughters of his nearest friends were not safe from his
licentious plots. The ribaldry of his conversation moved astonishment
even in that age. To the religion of his country he offered, in the mere
wantonness of impiety, insults too foul to be described. His mendacity
and his effrontery passed into proverbs. Of all the liars of his time he
was the most deliberate, the most inventive and the most circumstantial.
What shame meant he did not seem to understand. No reproaches, even when
pointed and barbed with the sharpest wit, appeared to give him pain.
Great satirists, animated by a deadly personal aversion, exhausted
all their strength in attacks upon him. They assailed him with keen
invective; they assailed him with still keener irony; but they found
that neither invective nor irony could move him to any thing but an
unforced smile and a goodhumoured curse; and they at length threw down
the lash, acknowledging that it was impossible to make him feel. That,
with such vices, he should have played a great part in life, should have
carried numerous elections against the most formidable opposition by his
personal popularity, should have had a large following in Parliament,
should have risen to the highest offices of the State, seems
extraordinary. But he lived in times when faction was almost a madness;
and he possessed in an eminent degree the qualities of the leader of
a faction. There was a single tie which he respected. The falsest
of mankind in all relations but one, he was the truest of Whigs. The
religious tenets of his family he had early renounced with contempt;
but to the politics of his family he stedfastly adhered through all the
temptations and dangers of half a century. In small things and in great
his devotion to his party constantly appeared. He had the finest stud in
England; and his delight was to win plates from Tories. Sometimes when,
in a distant county, it was fully expected that the horse of a High
Church squire would be first on the course, down came, on the very eve
of the race, Wharton's Careless, who had ceased to run at Newmarket
merely for want of competitors, or Wharton's Gelding, for whom Lewis
the Fourteenth had in vain offered a thousand pistoles. A man whose mere
sport was of this description was not likely to be easily beaten in
any serious contest. Such a master of the whole art of electioneering
England had never seen. Buckinghamshire was his own especial province;
and there he ruled without a rival. But he extended his care over
the Whig interest in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Wiltshire.
Sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty, members of Parliament were named by
him. As a canvasser he was irresistible. He never forgot a face that
he had once seen. Nay, in the towns in which he wished to establish an
interest, he remembered, not only the voters, but their families.
His opponents were confounded by the strength of his memory and the
affability of his deportment, and owned, that it was impossible to
contend against a great man who called the shoemaker by his Christian
name, who was sure that the butcher's daughter must be growing a fine
girl, and who was anxious to know whether the blacksmith's youngest boy
was breeched. By such arts as these he made himself so popular that
his journeys to the Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions resembled royal
progresses. The bells of every parish through which he passed were rung,
and flowers were strewed along the road. It was commonly believed that,
in the course of his life, he expended on his parliamentary interest not
less than eighty thousand pounds, a sum which, when compared with the
value of estates, must be considered as equivalent to more than three
hundred thousand pounds in our time.

But the chief service which Wharton rendered to the Whig party was that
of bringing in recruits from the young aristocracy. He was quite as
dexterous a canvasser among the embroidered coats at the Saint James's
Coffeehouse as among the leathern aprons at Wycombe and Aylesbury. He
had his eye on every boy of quality who came of age; and it was not
easy for such a boy to resist the arts of a noble, eloquent and wealthy
flatterer, who united juvenile vivacity to profound art and long
experience of the gay world. It mattered not what the novice preferred,
gallantry or field sports, the dicebox or the bottle. Wharton soon found
out the master passion, offered sympathy, advice and assistance, and,
while seeming to be only the minister of his disciple's pleasures, made
sure of his disciple's vote.

The party to whose interests Wharton, with such spirit and constancy,
devoted his time, his fortune, his talents, his very vices, judged
him, as was natural, far too leniently. He was widely known by the
very undeserved appellation of Honest Tom. Some pious men, Burnet, for
example, and Addison, averted their eyes from the scandal which he gave,
and spoke of him, not indeed with esteem, yet with goodwill. A most
ingenious and accomplished Whig, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, author
of the Characteristics, described Wharton as the most mysterious of
human beings, as a strange compound of best and worst, of private
depravity and public virtue, and owned himself unable to understand how
a man utterly without principle in every thing but politics should in
politics be as true as steel. But that which, in the judgment of one
faction, more than half redeemed all Wharton's faults, seemed to the
other faction to aggravate them all. The opinion which the Tories
entertained of him is expressed in a single line written after his death
by the ablest man of that party; "He was the most universal villain that
ever I knew. " [480] Wharton's political adversaries thirsted for
his blood, and repeatedly tried to shed it. Had he not been a man of
imperturbable temper, dauntless courage and consummate skill in fence,
his life would have been a short one.
But neither anger nor danger ever
deprived him of his presence of mind; he was an incomparable swordsman;
and he had a peculiar way of disarming opponents which moved the envy of
all the duellists of his time. His friends said that he had never given
a challenge, that he had never refused one, that he had never taken a
life, and yet that he had never fought without having his antagonist's
life at his mercy. [481]

The four men who have been described resembled each other so little that
it may be thought strange that they should ever have been able to act
in concert. They did, however, act in the closest concert during many
years. They more than once rose and more than once fell together. But
their union lasted till it was dissolved by death. Little as some of
them may have deserved esteem, none of them can be accused of having
been false to his brethren of the Junto.

While the great body of the Whigs was, under these able chiefs, arraying
itself in order resembling that of a regular army, the Tories were in a
state of an ill drilled and ill officered militia. They were numerous;
and they were zealous; but they can hardly be said to have had, at this
time, any chief in the House of Commons. The name of Seymour had once
been great among them, and had not quite lost its influence. But,
since he had been at the Board of Treasury, he had disgusted them
by vehemently defending all that he had himself, when out of place,
vehemently attacked. They had once looked up to the Speaker, Trevor; but
his greediness, impudence and venality were now so notorious that all
respectable gentlemen, of all shades of opinion, were ashamed to see him
in the chair. Of the old Tory members Sir Christopher Musgrave alone had
much weight. Indeed the real leaders of the party were two or three men
bred in principles diametrically opposed to Toryism, men who had carried
Whiggism to the verge of republicanism, and who had been considered not
merely as Low Churchmen, but as more than half Presbyterians. Of these
men the most eminent were two great Herefordshire squires, Robert Harley
and Paul Foley.

The space which Robert Harley fills in the history of three reigns,
his elevation, his fall, the influence which, at a great crisis, he
exercised on the politics of all Europe, the close intimacy in which
he lived with some of the greatest wits and poets of his time, and the
frequent recurrence of his name in the works of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot,
and Prior, must always make him an object of interest. Yet the man
himself was of all men the least interesting. There is indeed a
whimsical contrast between the very ordinary qualities of his mind and
the very extraordinary vicissitudes of his fortune.

He was the heir of a Puritan family. His father, Sir Edward Harley,
had been conspicuous among the patriots of the Long parliament, had
commanded a regiment under Essex, had, after the Restoration, been an
active opponent of the Court, had supported the Exclusion Bill, had
harboured dissenting preachers, had frequented meetinghouses, and had
made himself so obnoxious to the ruling powers that at the time of the
Western Insurrection, he had been placed under arrest, and his house
had been searched for arms. When the Dutch army was marching from Torbay
towards London, he and his eldest son Robert declared for the Prince
of Orange and a free Parliament, raised a large body of horse, took
possession of Worcester, and evinced their zeal against Popery by
publicly breaking to pieces, in the High Street of that city, a piece
of sculpture which to rigid precisians seemed idolatrous. Soon after the
Convention became a Parliament, Robert Harley was sent up to Westminster
as member for a Cornish borough. His conduct was such as might have
been expected from his birth and education. He was a Whig, and indeed an
intolerant and vindictive Whig. Nothing would satisfy him but a general
proscription of the Tories. His name appears in the list of those
members who voted for the Sacheverell clause; and, at the general
election which took place in the spring of 1690, the party which he had
persecuted made great exertions to keep him out of the House of Commons.
A cry was raised that the Harleys were mortal enemies of the Church; and
this cry produced so much effect that it was with difficulty that any of
them could obtain a seat. Such was the commencement of the public life
of a man whose name, a quarter of a century later, was inseparably
coupled with the High Church in the acclamations of Jacobite mobs. [482]

Soon, however, it began to be observed that in every division Harley
was in the company of those gentlemen who held his political opinions
in abhorrence; nor was this strange; for he affected the character of
a Whig of the old pattern; and before the Revolution it had always
been supposed that a Whig was a person who watched with jealousy every
exertion of the prerogative, who was slow to loose the strings of the
public purse, and who was extreme to mark the faults of the ministers
of the Crown. Such a Whig Harley still professed to be. He did not admit
that the recent change of dynasty had made any change in the duties of a
representative of the people. The new government ought to be observed as
suspiciously, checked as severely, and supplied as sparingly as the old
one. Acting on these principles he necessarily found himself acting
with men whose principles were diametrically opposed to his. He liked to
thwart the King; they liked to thwart the usurper; the consequence
was that, whenever there was an opportunity of thwarting William, the
Roundhead stayed in the House or went into the lobby in company with the
whole crowd of Cavaliers.

Soon Harley acquired the authority of a leader among those with whom,
notwithstanding wide differences of opinion, he ordinarily voted. His
influence in Parliament was indeed altogether out of proportion to his
abilities. His intellect was both small and slow. He was unable to take
a large view of any subject. He never acquired the art of expressing
himself in public with fluency and perspicuity. To the end of his life
he remained a tedious, hesitating and confused speaker. [483]

He had none of the external graces of an orator. His countenance was
heavy, his figure mean and somewhat deformed, and his gestures uncouth.
Yet he was heard with respect. For, such as his mind was, it had been
assiduously cultivated. His youth had been studious; and to the last he
continued to love books and the society of men of genius and learning.
Indeed he aspired to the character of a wit and a poet, and occasionally
employed hours which should have been very differently spent in
composing verses more execrable than the bellman's. [484] His time
however was not always so absurdly wasted. He had that sort of industry
and that sort of exactness which would have made him a respectable
antiquary or King at Arms. His taste led him to plod among old records;
and in that age it was only by plodding among old records that any
man could obtain an accurate and extensive knowledge of the law of
Parliament. Having few rivals in this laborious and unattractive
pursuit, he soon began to be regarded as an oracle on questions of form
and privilege. His moral character added not a little to his influence.
He had indeed great vices; but they were not of a scandalous kind.
He was not to be corrupted by money. His private life was regular. No
illicit amour was imputed to him even by satirists. Gambling he held
in aversion; and it was said that he never passed White's, then the
favourite haunt of noble sharpers and dupes, without an exclamation of
anger. His practice of flustering himself daily with claret was hardly
considered as a fault by his contemporaries. His knowledge, his gravity
and his independent position gained for him the ear of the House; and
even his bad speaking was, in some sense, an advantage to him. For
people are very loth to admit that the same man can unite very different
kinds of excellence. It is soothing to envy to believe that what is
splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound. Very
slowly was the public brought to acknowledge that Mansfield was a great
jurist, and that Burke was a great master of political science. Montague
was a brilliant rhetorician, and, therefore, though he had ten times
Harley's capacity for the driest parts of business, was represented by
detractors as a superficial, prating pretender. But from the absence of
show in Harley's discourses many people inferred that there must be
much substance; and he was pronounced to be a deep read, deep thinking
gentleman, not a fine talker, but fitter to direct affairs of state than
all the fine talkers in the world. This character he long supported with
that cunning which is frequently found in company with ambitious and
unquiet mediocrity. He constantly had, even with his best friends, an
air of mystery and reserve which seemed to indicate that he knew some
momentous secret, and that his mind was labouring with some vast design.
In this way he got and long kept a high reputation for wisdom. It was
not till that reputation had made him an Earl, a Knight of the Garter,
Lord High Treasurer of England, and master of the fate of Europe, that
his admirers began to find out that he was really a dull puzzleheaded
man. [485]

Soon after the general election of 1690, Harley, generally voting with
the Tories, began to turn Tory. The change was so gradual as to be
almost imperceptible; but was not the less real. He early began to hold
the Tory doctrine that England ought to confine herself to a maritime
war. He early felt the true Tory antipathy to Dutchmen and to
moneyed men. The antipathy to Dissenters, which was necessary to
the completeness of the character, came much later. At length the
transformation was complete; and the old haunter of conventicles became
an intolerant High Churchman. Yet to the last the traces of his early
breeding would now and then show themselves; and, while he acted after
the fashion of Laud, he sometimes wrote in the style of Praise God
Barebones. [486]

Of Paul Foley we know comparatively little. His history, up to a certain
point, greatly resembles that of Harley: but he appears to have been
superior to Harley both in parts and in elevation of character. He was
the son of Thomas Foley, a new man, but a. man of great merit, who,
having begun life with nothing, had created a noble estate by ironworks,
and who was renowned for his spotless integrity and his munificent
charity. The Foleys were, like their neighbours the Harleys, Whigs and
Puritans. Thomas Foley lived on terms of close intimacy with Baxter, in
whose writings he is mentioned with warm eulogy. The opinions and the
attachments of Paul Foley were at first those of his family. But be,
like Harley, became, merely from the vehemence of his Whiggism, an ally
of the Tories, and might, perhaps, like Harley, have been completely
metamorphosed into a Tory, if the process of transmutation had not been
interrupted by death. Foley's abilities were highly respectable, and had
been improved by education. He was so wealthy that it was unnecessary
for him to follow the law as a profession; but he had studied it
carefully as a science. His morals were without stain; and the greatest
fault which could be imputed to him was that he paraded his independence
and disinterestedness too ostentatiously, and was so much afraid of
being thought to fawn that he was always growling.

Another convert ought to be mentioned. Howe, lately the most virulent
of the Whigs, had been, by the loss of his place, turned into one of the
most virulent of the Tories. The deserter brought to the party which he
had joined no weight of character, no capacity or semblance of capacity
for great affairs, but much parliamentary ability of a low kind, much
spite and much impudence. No speaker of that time seems to have had, in
such large measure, both the power and the inclination to give pain.

The assistance of these men was most welcome to the Tory party; but it
was impossible that they could, as yet, exercise over that party the
entire authority of leaders. For they still called themselves Whigs,
and generally vindicated their Tory votes by arguments grounded on Whig
principles. [487]

From this view of the state of parties in the House of Commons, it
seems clear that Sunderland had good reason for recommending that the
administration should be entrusted to the Whigs. The King, however,
hesitated long before he could bring himself to quit that neutral
position which he had long occupied between the contending parties. If
one of those parties was disposed to question his title, the other
was on principle hostile to his prerogative. He still remembered with
bitterness the unreasonable and vindictive conduct of the Convention
Parliament at the close of 1689 and the beginning of 1690; and he shrank
from the thought of being entirely in the hands of the men who had
obstructed the Bill of Indemnity, who had voted for the Sacheverell
clause, who had tried to prevent him from taking the command of his army
in Ireland, and who had called him an ungrateful tyrant merely because
he would not be their slave and their hangman. He had once, by a bold
and unexpected effort, freed himself from their yoke; and he was not
inclined to put it on his neck again. He personally disliked Wharton
and Russell. He thought highly of the capacity of Caermarthen, of
the integrity of Nottingham, of the diligence and financial skill of
Godolphin. It was only by slow degrees that the arguments of Sunderland,
backed by the force of circumstances, overcame all objections.

On the seventh of November 1693 the Parliament met; and the conflict of
parties instantly began. William from the throne pressed on the Houses
the necessity of making a great exertion to arrest the progress of
France on the Continent. During the last campaign, he said, she had, on
every point, had a superiority of force; and it had therefore been found
impossible to cope with her. His allies had promised to increase their
armies; and he trusted that the Commons would enable him to do the same.
[488]

The Commons at their next sitting took the King's speech into
consideration. The miscarriage of the Smyrna fleet was the chief subject
of discussion. The cry for inquiry was universal: but it was evident
that the two parties raised that cry for very different reasons.
Montague spoke the sense of the Whigs. He declared that the disasters of
the summer could not, in his opinion, be explained by the ignorance and
imbecility of those who had charge of the naval administration. There
must have been treason. It was impossible to believe that Lewis, when he
sent his Brest squadron to the Straits of Gibraltar, and left the whole
coast of his kingdom from Dunkirk to Bayonne unprotected, had trusted
merely to chance. He must have been well assured that his fleet
would meet with a vast booty under a feeble convoy. As there had been
treachery in some quarters, there had been incapacity in others. The
State was ill served. And then the orator pronounced a warm panegyric on
his friend Somers. "Would that all men in power would follow the example
of my Lord Keeper! If all patronage were bestowed as judiciously and
disinterestedly as his, we should not see the public offices filled with
men who draw salaries and perform no duties. " It was moved and carried
unanimously, that the Commons would support their Majesties, and would
forthwith proceed to investigate the cause of the disaster in the Bay of
Lagos. [489] The Lords of the Admiralty were directed to produce a
great mass of documentary evidence. The King sent down copies of the
examinations taken before the Committee of Council which Mary had
appointed to inquire into the grievances of the Turkey merchants. The
Turkey merchants themselves were called in and interrogated. Rooke,
though too ill to stand or speak, was brought in a chair to the bar,
and there delivered in a narrative of his proceedings. The Whigs soon
thought that sufficient ground had been laid for a vote condemning the
naval administration, and moved a resolution attributing the miscarriage
of the Smyrna fleet to notorious and treacherous mismanagement. That
there had been mismanagement could not be disputed; but that there had
been foul play had certainly not been proved. The Tories proposed that
the word "treacherous" should be omitted. A division took place; and the
Whigs carried their point by a hundred and forty votes to a hundred and
three. Wharton was a teller for the majority. [490]

It was now decided that there had been treason, but not who was the
traitor. Several keen debates followed. The Whigs tried to throw the
blame on Killegrew and Delaval, who were Tories; the Tories did their
best to make out that the fault lay with the Victualling Department,
which was under the direction of Whigs. But the House of Commons has
always been much more ready to pass votes of censure drawn in general
terms than to brand individuals by name. A resolution clearing the
Victualling Office was proposed by Montague, and carried, after a
debate of two days, by a hundred and eighty-eight votes to a hundred and
fifty-two. [491] But when the victorious party brought forward a motion
inculpating the admirals, the Tories came up in great numbers from the
country, and, after a debate which lasted from nine in the morning till
near eleven at night, succeeded in saving their friends. The Noes were a
hundred and seventy, and the Ayes only a hundred and sixty-one. Another
attack was made a few days later with no better success. The Noes were
a hundred and eighty-five, the Ayes only a hundred and seventy-five. The
indefatigable and implacable Wharton was on both occasions tellers for
the minority. [492]

In spite of this check the advantage was decidedly with the Whigs;
The Tories who were at the head of the naval administration had indeed
escaped impeachment; but the escape had been so narrow that it was
impossible for the King to employ them any longer. The advice of
Sunderland prevailed. A new Commission of Admiralty was prepared; and
Russell was named First Lord. He had already been appointed to the
command of the Channel fleet.

His elevation made it necessary that Nottingham should retire. For,
though it was not then unusual to see men who were personally and
politically hostile to each other holding high offices at the same time,
the relation between the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary
of State, who had charge of what would now be called the War Department,
was of so peculiar a nature that the public service could not be
well conducted without cordial cooperation between them; and between
Nottingham and Russell such cooperation was not to be expected. "I thank
you," William said to Nottingham, "for your services. I have nothing to
complain of in your conduct. It is only from necessity that I part with
you. " Nottingham retired with dignity. Though a very honest man, he went
out of office much richer than he had come in five years before. What
were then considered as the legitimate emoluments of his place were
great; he had sold Kensington House to the Crown for a large sum; and he
had probably, after the fashion of that time, obtained for himself
some lucrative grants. He laid out all his gains in purchasing land. He
heard, he said, that his enemies meant to accuse him of having acquired
wealth by illicit means. He was perfectly ready to abide the issue of
an inquiry. He would not, as some ministers had done, place his fortune
beyond the reach of the justice of his country. He would have no secret
hoard. He would invest nothing in foreign funds. His property should all
be such as could be readily discovered and seized. [493]

During some weeks the seals which Nottingham had delivered up remained
in the royal closet. To dispose of them proved no easy matter. They were
offered to Shrewsbury, who of all the Whig leaders stood highest in the
King's favour; but Shrewsbury excused himself, and, in order to avoid
further importunity, retired into the country. There he soon received
a pressing letter from Elizabeth Villiers. This lady had, when a girl,
inspired William with a passion which had caused much scandal and much
unhappiness in the little Court of the Hague. Her influence over him she
owed not to her personal charms,--for it tasked all the art of Kneller
to make her look tolerably on canvass,--not to those talents which
peculiarly belong to her sex,--for she did not excel in playful talk,
and her letters are remarkably deficient in feminine ease and grace--,
but to powers of mind which qualified her to partake the cares and guide
the counsels of statesmen. To the end of her life great politicians
sought her advice. Even Swift, the shrewdest and most cynical of her
contemporaries, pronounced her the wisest of women, and more than once
sate, fascinated by her conversation, from two in the afternoon till
near midnight. [494] By degrees the virtues and charms of Mary conquered
the first place in her husband's affection. But he still, in difficult
conjunctures, frequently applied to Elizabeth Villiers for advice and
assistance. She now implored Shrewsbury to reconsider his determination,
and not to throw away the opportunity of uniting the Whig party for
ever. Wharton and Russell wrote to the same effect. In reply came
flimsy and unmeaning excuses: "I am not qualified for a court life; I
am unequal to a place which requires much exertion; I do not quite agree
with any party in the State; in short, I am unfit for the world; I
want to travel; I want to see Spain. " These were mere pretences. Had
Shrewsbury spoken the whole truth, he would have said that he had, in
an evil hour, been false to the cause of that Revolution in which he had
borne so great a part, that he had entered into engagements of which he
repented, but from which he knew not how to extricate himself, and that,
while he remained under those engagements, he was unwilling to enter
into the service of the existing government. Marlborough, Godolphin and
Russell, indeed, had no scruple about corresponding with one King while
holding office under the other. But Shrewsbury had, what was wanting
to Marlborough, Godolphin and Russell, a conscience, a conscience which
indeed too often failed to restrain him from doing wrong, but which
never failed to punish him. [495]

In consequence of his refusal to accept the Seals, the ministerial
arrangements which the King had planned were not carried into entire
effect till the end of the session. Meanwhile the proceedings of the two
Houses had been highly interesting and important.

Soon after the Parliament met, the attention of the Commons was again
called to the state of the trade with India; and the charter which had
just been granted to the Old Company was laid before them. They would
probably have been disposed to sanction the new arrangement, which, in
truth, differed little from that which they had themselves suggested not
many months before, if the Directors had acted with prudence. But the
Directors, from the day on which they had obtained their charter, had
persecuted the interlopers without mercy, and had quite forgotten that
it was one thing to persecute interlopers in the Eastern Seas, and
another to persecute them in the port of London. Hitherto the war of the
monopolists against the private trade had been generally carried on at
the distance of fifteen thousand miles from England. If harsh things
were done, the English did not see them done, and did not hear of them
till long after they had been done; nor was it by any means easy to
ascertain at Westminster who had been right and who had been wrong in a
dispute which had arisen three or four years before at Moorshedabad or
Canton. With incredible rashness the Directors determined, at the very
moment when the fate of their company was in the balance, to give the
people of this country a near view of the most odious features of the
monopoly. Some wealthy merchants of London had equipped a fine ship
named the Redbridge. Her crew was numerous, her cargo of immense value.
Her papers had been made out for Alicant: but there was some reason to
suspect that she was really bound for the countries lying beyond the
Cape of Good Hope. She was stopped by the Admiralty, in obedience to an
order which the Company obtained from the Privy Council, doubtless by
the help of the Lord President. Every day that she lay in the Thames
caused a heavy expense to the owners. The indignation in the City was
great and general. The Company maintained that from the legality of the
monopoly the legality of the detention necessarily followed. The
public turned the argument round, and, being firmly convinced that the
detention was illegal, drew the inference that the monopoly must be
illegal too. The dispute was at the height when the Parliament met.
Petitions on both sides were speedily laid on the table of the
Commons; and it was resolved that these petitions should be taken into
consideration by a Committee of the whole House. The first question on
which the conflicting parties tried their strength was the choice of
a chairman. The enemies of the Old Company proposed Papillon, once the
closest ally and subsequently the keenest opponent of Child, and carried
their point by a hundred and thirty-eight votes to a hundred and six.
The Committee proceeded to inquire by what authority the Redbridge had
been stopped. One of her owners, Gilbert Heathcote, a rich merchant and
a stanch Whig, appeared at the bar as a witness. He was asked whether he
would venture to deny that the ship had really been fitted out for the
Indian trade. "It is no sin that I know of," he answered, "to trade
with India; and I shall trade with India till I am restrained by Act of
Parliament. " Papillon reported that in the opinion of the Committee, the
detention of the Redbridge was illegal. The question was then put, that
the House would agree with the Committee. The friends of the Old Company
ventured on a second division, and were defeated by a hundred and
seventy-one votes to a hundred and twenty-five. [496]

The blow was quickly followed up. A few days later it was moved that all
subjects of England had equal right to trade to the East Indies unless
prohibited by Act of Parliament; and the supporters of the Old Company,
sensible that they were in a minority, suffered the motion to pass
without a division.